7/21/07

In Oaxaca, Because There's Culture, There's Resistance:

A Full Report on the Battle for Oaxaca

APPO Battle for Oaxaca, July 16, 2007 ---- On the morning of July 16, 2007, thepeople of Oaxaca poured into the Zocalo, intent on reclaiming their annualcultural celebration known as the Guelagetza. By late morning, the People'sGuelagetza had become a megamarcha with thousands taking to the streets. Byearly afternoon, it had become a battle for the city, after police attacked thepeaceful march. ---- In the indigenous language of Zapoteco, Guelagetza means toparticipate and cooperate at the same time.

For hundreds of years, it has represented a space where peoples came together from across Oaxaca to celebrate and share their cultures. ---- But in recent years, the festival has been turned into a commercial spectacle for the benefit of tourists and corporations, with native Oaxaqueños having to pay thousands of dollars to watch as cheapened versions of their traditions and histories are sold off. This year, theofficial Guelagetza is being sponsored by Coca-Cola, Inc. and the government of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.

The official Guelagetza is not us, explained one woman, a Oaxaqueñaartisan. Our Guelagetza has to be shared... It's like our life itself,said another artisan.

This year, in a bold attempt to reclaim an authentic traditionalcelebration from the government and big business, the Popular Assembly ofthe People of Oaxaca (APPO) called for a boycott of the officialGuelaguetza, organizing an alternative festival.

The People's Guelaguetza was part of a resurgence of the popular movementto overthrow the tyrant Governor Ulises Ruiz, and to strive forself-determination of the people of Oaxaca, calling for Todo el poder alpueblo, All the power to the people.

The movement hasn't gone away, said Dzahui and Patrocinio, twoindigenous students who are activists with the APPO. People have gainedconsciousness. We know that, yes, we can...The people can governthemselves.

For a time in 2006, the people of Oaxaca did govern themselves, aspopular assemblies successfully took over the city from the government.But last fall, government forces crushed the popular rebellion andregained control through violent repression, detentions anddisappearances.

The state strikes fear into the people, Dzahui explained. It'ssomething like terrorism. But the people are losing the fear.

In Oaxaca, the resistance movement has been growing steadily over the pastfew months, with major actions marking the anniversary of last year'suprising. But the repression has persisted. The Federal Preventive Police(PFP) still occupy and patrol the streets of Oaxaca City, aided by localgunmen known as porros and pistoleros.

Meanwhile, in the countryside, the government has suppressed popularmovements by waging low-intensity warfare on autonomous indigenouscommunities. Recently, paramilitaries opened fire on indigenous protestersdefending the forests around San Isidro.

Early this month, Oaxaca was declared in a state of siege after Leftistguerillas of the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) reportedly blew up gaspipelines of the Pemex corporation. On July 14, the government used theattacks as its rationale for the military cordon formed around theGuelagetza Auditorium, blocking the entry of the People's Guelagetza.

That day, Florentino Lopez, a spokesperson for the APPO, issued thisstatement: We denounce that the state government tries to repress thosewho attend the People's Guelaguetza. We denounce that it tries to massacrethe people, for which we declare ourselves on alert and we hold UlisesRuiz and the federal government responsible.

Nonetheless, the APPO went forward with the opening events of the People'sGuelaguetza, the colorful Convite and the nighttime Calenda on July 14 and15. The Lunes del Cerro, the biggest day of the festival, began early on adamp morning in the Zocalo. The rain came and went, but the people keptcoming.

The plaza was already bustling with an alternative APPO street fair,encircled by a fair sponsored by the governing party of Ulises Ruiz. Onmany walls, fresh paint declared, Long Live the People's Guelaguetza!Boycott the Commercial Guelaguetza! with stencils of a crowd ofindigenous women, and of a man in indigenous dress, gun and machete inhand, a skull of mourning in his headdress.

At 9 am, the cultural delegations began streaming in from all acrossOaxaca, from the mountains, the valleys, the isthmus. They paraded aroundthe Zocalo to the cheers of waiting crowds of (mostly) Oaxaqueños who hadcome to celebrate their own Guelaguetza. The air was full of joy,festivity, defiance. The brass bands struck up a number, the dancersstarted up a dance, many decked out in bright colors, carrying flowers,flags and traditional symbols.

Then, with the brass bands blaring and the delegations leading the way,the People's Guelaguetza took to the streets. They were headed for theAuditorium at the Fortín Mountain, military cordon be damned. The peoplebegan to chant:

Oaxaca lives, the struggle continues!

The march route soon became a river of bodies with people chanting,dancing, singing and playing music. The cultural delegations, in theirtraditional dress and costumes, performed, danced and chanted as theywalked.

Ulises, understand, the culture is not for sale!

The mood of the crowd was festive and determined, its displays ofspontaneous celebration reflecting the hopes and frustrations of peoplesseeking to reclaim the dignity and authenticity of their cultures andtraditions, which they felt had been betrayed and commercialized forprofit in the official Guelaguetza.

The growing crowd was made up of people both young and old, male andfemale, indigenous, mestizo and foreign. Mothers and fathers marched withchildren at their sides or in their arms. Students chanted with workingpeople, as older men and women sang and danced. Oaxaqueños and visitorsmoved freely among each other. Resistance and unity in motion.

Women to the center! some cried, and the women of Oaxaca took the centerof the street, clapping, chanting, cheering.

As the crowd approached the Fortín Mountain, it had grown to over 10,000participants and observers, according to the official estimates of theOaxacan newspaper Noticias.

You see it, you feel it, the people are present!

Just hundreds of feet from the auditorium, the march was met with hundredsof police, who lined up to create a wall across the avenue, preventingpeople from accessing the auditorium. Nearby, trucks were full ofreinforcement officers waiting for escalation. There were FederalPreventive Police, Municipal Police, Industrial and Bank Police, the ElitePolice of the Mexican Army.

They stood in full combat gear, ready to make war with the People'sGuelaguetza. Some chewed gum, smug and smiling. Some, mere boys, looked onterrified. They all wielded big wooden bats. They sported shields,helmets, ammunition belts, tear gas guns, real guns.

At first, only a few hundred people approached the police line, with therest of the march about ten yards back, continuing to chant and playmusic:

We must press, we must press, the People's Guelaguetza!

The APPO attempted to negotiate a way for people to enter the auditorium,but no go. Orders were orders. They had come from the top: If there isno permission, order must be enforced were the words of Sergio SegristeRíos, Secretary of Citizen Protection, in a statement to the press twodays before.

As the crowd's hope was transformed into anger, there grew an explosivetension in the air between the people and the police. The unarmed crowdwas decidedly unafraid of the armed officers standing before them. Thesewere people accustomed to such repression, yet still infuriated by it. Thecrowd began to fill in towards the officers, and people moved between eachother, bodies in conversation.

The people wanted only to pass, they declared. They wanted no violence.Old women scolded the police, children looked up and asked why not. Peopleheld out empty hands to show they were unarmed. They demanded to pass, butheld back from pushing forward towards the police. A cushion of spacestill separated them.

Only the cultural delegations turned back?they would resist in their ownway. On the other side of the police line appeared another, smaller crowd,supporters from over the mountain who had come for the Guelaguetza. Theyraised their hands and cheered. ¨Join us!¨ cried the crowd across thepolice line, but they could not. The police now had two fronts, one behindand one ahead.

Over the course of 15 minutes, anger continued to mount at what was seenas an occupying army, standing in the way of the People's Guelaguetza.Some in the crowd chanted, some joked and talked, their wordsintermittently interrupted by the pop-pop of firecrackers. Others stoodsilent, ready for the attack which they knew would eventually come, andwhich many had experienced in other places and times.

Assassins! Assassins! they shouted, for all the times they had seen itbefore.

There was an atmosphere of normality at the scene, as if this show ofgovernmental force and repression was expected and familiar. Once again, as Florentino Lopez of the APPO commented, ¨the state will try to drownin blood the struggle of the people.

Fists were raised high now. Voices, too: The people, united, will neverbe defeated!

In the middle of the chants, the police line systematically pushed intothe crowd, batons raised, attempting to drive people back down the street.Again, people held up open palms: We are unarmed. We are families,children, old women and men. We are the people of Oaxaca. But the policewere charging, batons swinging, striking bodies and cracking heads.

In response to this offensive action, the crowd began throwing small rocksfrom a decorative trough that lay before the Plaza Fortín Hotel.Immediately came the tear gas, boom, boom, canister after canister,tracing long arcs through the air. The people began to scatter, but notfar. They turned back around to hold their ground.

As a young participant named Carlos would later describe it, Therepression came from the government. We did nothing more than defendourselves...The repression was a weapon of the government against thosewho raised their voice.

The strongest weapon in the hands of the government was the tear gas.People crying, covering their faces, cradling their heads or others'heads. Running, stumbling, fighting their way through the gas clouds fordear life. Men and women grabbed the smoking canisters and threw themback, sacrificing their eyes and skin. Groups of medics and supportersrushing in to aid people impacted by the gas or injured by projectiles.

Still, the movement of people seemed fluid and almost natural, approachingand retreating from the line of officers. It was the motion of peopletired of this customary violence and repression, but also of people whoseemed to know how to take care of and defend each other. Women and men,old and young, threw projectiles, administered aid, carried their comradesto safety.

The gas attack intensifying, more rocks flying in both directions. Womenand men of all ages began breaking off pieces of pavement and brick,making piles in the street for others to throw. A woman, older and dressedin her Sunday's best, cracked the roadway's divider, chiseling free largered bricks to be thrown back at the Federal Preventive Police.

The crowd began to see the rising cost of resistance in the combatants andbystanders being helped or carried back from the frontlines, heaving fromthe gas, bloodied and broken by batons or projectiles thrown by thepolice, some of the people obviously unconscious.

Police reinforcements now attempted to surround the crowd from the sidestreets. To halt their advance, barricades went up?makeshift barricadesmade of street signs, poles, advertisements, whatever people could gettheir hands on. They recalled the barricades built by the hundreds todefend the neighborhoods here in 2006.

A bus was driven into the middle of the avenue, then a second, then athird. They formed a much bigger barricade. As officers attempted to seizethe buses, the crowd forced them out. Others proceeded to push back theentire police line, this time with fire. The buses were set ablaze withmolotov cocktails.

Soon, big plumes of black smoke were wafting through the air, minglingwith the tear gas over the buses and barricades. On one of the buses wasspraypainted, Resistance can do it. Other buses reportedly commandeeredand driven by supporters soon arrived on the avenue.

Reporters and photographers?ourselves among them?scrambled throughout thecrowd, recording the clash of people and police. Let people see what ishappening, said one bystander. Let everybody see what this evilgovernment is doing to people.

Police and army reinforcements were coming from all sides. They swarmeddown from the top of the hill, over rooftops, down stairs, throughpeople's gardens. In the face of this overwhelming force, the remainingcrowds beat a retreat. Small fronts held their ground at nearbyintersections, vowing to defend the streets.

It began to rain, hard. Boys and girls stood in the rain, handing eachother sticks and masks for security. An empty Coke truck, burst open andransacked, sat lonely on an empty side street. As it turned out,Coca-Cola, Inc., which had supplied its sponsorship for the officialGuelaguetza, had also supplied the combatants with their cocktails and thestreet medics with their solutions.

And as a man down the street displayed for onlookers, Combined Systems,Inc., of Jamestown, Pennsylvania had supplied the police with CN Gas,their weapon of choice.

Mothers and fathers looked for their children along streets still thickwith the gas. I lost my daughter, cried one woman, weeping as anotherhelped her walk. She went to the front and I can't find her, I can't findher.

A few blocks away, the streets of the center were clogged with traffic astourists and some residents drove out in horror, staring from foggedwindows and shaking their heads.

After over five hours of combat, the day´s battles were coming to an end.On the other side of town, at the Plaza de la Danza, the delegations hadmanaged to resume the Guelaguetza on a makeshift stage, in spite of therepression, in spite of it all.

Roman, a Oaxaqueño teacher and APPO activist, later argued, It's anothervictory for the people's resistance in Oaxaca. Because it didn't happenthat the People's Guelaguetza was suspended. To the contrary.

The response of the mainstream press to these events of July 16th has beeneither silence or spin. The Associated Press reproduced the Oaxacangovernment's statement verbatim: About 200 people wearing masks andcarrying sticks, stones and bottle rockets began to provoke thepolice...The police repelled the attack using tear gas. But independentmedia reports, photos and video have all debunked the government's versionof events.

The world is only now learning how dearly the people of Oaxaca have paidfor their Guelaguetza and their resistance: 65 detained or disappeared,50 seriously injured and possibly one protester dead (still unconfirmed)at the hands of the police. There have also been widespread reports oftorture, beating and sexual abuse inside the prisons.

The APPO is now mobilizing all its forces against government repressionand police violence, and for the release of all prisoners and disappeared.At the same time, the APPO refuses to negotiate with the government aslong as Ulises Ruiz remains in power and the PFP continues to occupy thecity. They have issued three immediate and non-negotiable demands:

For an end to police repression, harassment, and intimidation of thesocial and popular movements in Oaxaca. Condemn governmental actions andindiscriminate use of force by the State and Federal police. Demand therelease of all political prisoners, making Federal and State officialsresponsible in the case of arbitrary detentions and disappearances ofcivilians.

The movement in Oaxaca is now joined in this campaign by national andinternational human rights organizations, and by a global movement ofsolidarity.

The APPO has issued an international call for mobilizations in your ownplaces of origin, to integrate yourselves into a human wall to stop themassacre against the people of Oaxaca. Already protests have beeninitiated by the Zapatistas' Other Campaign in Mexico and by theBinational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB) in California.

Back in Oaxaca, thousands marched again on July 18 to denounce the policebrutality, and to cast light on the plight of their imprisoned, theirdisappeared, their wounded. La Marcha del Silencio, The March of Silence,began at dusk. Its participants, wearing black, marched silently from theLlano Park, down the winding streets and converging in the Zocalo.

Massive banners stretched the entire width of the street, displaying thenames and faces of all those detained, disappeared and in police custody.Giant wooden crosses reading Repression, Poverty and Misery linedthe march. There were puppets of fallen comrades, displays of flowers,entire families all masked in black, linked together by homemade chains.All silent.

The march concluded at the Zocalo with words shared from the victims'families. The crowed responded to these speeches with a chorus of chants,echoed from one end of the square to the next:

Liberty, liberty, to those imprisoned for struggling!

The day before, the APPO had met in an emergency assembly, whereagreements are made...democratically, with the participation of all. OnJuly 18, the assembly announced its plan to push ahead with the boycott ofthe commercial Guelaguetza, to hold massive marches of mourning everythree days, and to reestablish its encampment in the Zocalo.

Many here see the Battle of the Guelaguetza?or the Guerraguetza, assome are now calling it?as something much deeper than a one-day protest.Movement participants see it as a battle for Oaxaca itself, for itsculture and its people.

Patrocinio, indigenous student activist, said the demonstration was aboutreclaiming the traditions, rescuing the culture of our ancestors...Thegovernment doesn't give the people what they need, so we say ?Ya Basta!'[Enough is enough!]

As one of the anonymous women in an APPO artisans' collective put it, thenight after the repression, The government can rob everything, but itcan't rob your dignity, your culture, your customs and traditions?InOaxaca, because there's culture, there's resistance.

Teacher-activist Roman had this to say after the day was over: We willno longer permit our traditions and our culture to be sold to the bestbidder. Today demonstrated that the Guelaguetza has recuperated itsorigins, in which the peoples of Oaxaca can coexist without selling theculture. For this, he continued, the people of Oaxaca have decided tostruggle until their victory.

At his side that night of the 16th in the Zocalo, another teacher, a poetand indigenous activist, offered these words to those who would listen:

When I sing and speak the truth, this is my protest. And when I sing, Iopen other songs. But my song of Oaxaca doesn't exist today, because thepolice are here. Where are you, Oaxaca, where are you? I love you, Oaxaca,and I am with you.

Written by three eyewitnesses and independent reporters: Kelly Lee(Boston), James Kautz and Michael GW (New York City). Photographs andinterviews by Michael GW.

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